13 Weeks Pregnant: You Are What You Eat

01/09/2013 23:28
|
Updated
22 May 2015

Felicity Quigley
Parentdish UK

I'd heard the old wives' tales about weird pregnancy cravings and what they meant, but I didn't really believe them – I mean, I like what food I like and I dislike the food I dislike and that's that. Wrong! Now my nausea has subsided, I not only feel hungry pretty much all the time, I also have the strangest hankerings for certain things.

My latest obsession of any longevity is avocados. But not just as they are, they have to be in the form of homemade guacamole (a nice and tasty recipe for you: mash a ripe avocado, add the juice of half a lemon and plenty of lemon-pepper seasoning and mix well). I can have this paste on hot toast, with corn chips or on fajitas, but my absolute favourite thing is quesadillas. I have had this Mexican version of a toasted sandwich for lunch every single day for more than a week and I'm planning on having it today and tomorrow too. My fruit bowl is filled with them in various stages of readiness. (Oh, as an aside – to ripen an avocado quickly, place it in a paper bag with a ripening banana).

Modern wisdom (not sure if its based in fact or not) says that cravings in pregnancy are related to what your body and baby needs at that time. Avocados are described as quite a 'complete' food nutritionally, containing more than 20 vitamins and minerals, including foliate, iron, potassium, beta-carotene and unsaturated fats (the good fats!). So it seems that in addition to the vitamin supplements I am taking each day, my daily avocado fix is also adding value – hooray for that.

On the flipside, I seem to have developed incredibly strong aversions to foods that I normally love. For example, I really like Thai and Indian food (a bit of spice has always been a feature of my diet) but lately the thought of either of those cuisines swiftly reminds me of the biliousness and nausea of my recent past – poor P, whose hands-down favourite takeaway is a curry, has been banned from bringing them into the house – the mere smell of those spices sends me running.

I suppose in my case I have it lucky – cravings for pickles and ice cream or even dirt and dead leaves (known as "pica") that some women have seem to have passed me by – so far!

Did you have any strange cravings in your pregnancy? Did you go off certain foods that were a normal part of your non-pregnant diet?